simple web-server

[Pavol Murin]

hello python users,

could you point me to a very simple (single file is best) web-server?
I want to serve a few web-forms and run some shell scripts when the
forms are submitted. I might add Ajax later (this is not a
requirement, if it only supports forms it's OK).

Longer story:

I would like to provide a web-page for customization of an
application - it should run some shell commands as the user clicks
around in the page and at the end write a configuration file. I had a
look at the python wiki (http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebProgramming),
where various web servers and frameworks are listed. The frameworks
seem to heavy for such a simple task and BaseHTTPServer just seems to
be too light. So I took a look at the web-servers listed:
httpy had the last release 1,5 years ago, Medusa more than 5 years,
Twisted seems to be able to do a lot, so probably not the simple thing
I'm looking for. CherryPy looks promising, however it is still 89
files (including some that can be removed).

If CGIHTTPServer is a good answer, could you point me to a good
(nontrivial) example?

thank you, muro

 

[Larry Bates]

hello python users,

could you point me to a very simple (single file is best) web-server?
I want to serve a few web-forms and run some shell scripts when the
forms are submitted. I might add Ajax later (this is not a
requirement, if it only supports forms it's OK).

Longer story:

I would like to provide a web-page for customization of an
application - it should run some shell commands as the user clicks
around in the page and at the end write a configuration file. I had a
look at the python wiki (http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebProgramming),
where various web servers and frameworks are listed. The frameworks
seem to heavy for such a simple task and BaseHTTPServer just seems to
be too light. So I took a look at the web-servers listed:
httpy had the last release 1,5 years ago, Medusa more than 5 years,
Twisted seems to be able to do a lot, so probably not the simple thing
I'm looking for. CherryPy looks promising, however it is still 89
files (including some that can be removed).

If CGIHTTPServer is a good answer, could you point me to a good
(nontrivial) example?

thank you, muro

Take a look at twisted web, it fits in between.

-Larry

 

[Thomas Guettler]

hello python users,

could you point me to a very simple (single file is best) web-server?
I want to serve a few web-forms and run some shell scripts when the
forms are submitted. I might add Ajax later (this is not a
requirement, if it only supports forms it's OK).

If you want to run shell scripts, you might want to search for a web server written
in a shell script....

Running shell scripts which process CGI input are very insecure. It may
be possible to write secure shell scripts, but I think it is not worth
the trouble.

Django contains a simple web server for testing. But it runs as a single
process. So if one request needs long, all other requests wait.
I don't think django is too heavy for a simple task.

You can use CGIHTTPServer and the cgi module of the standard library, too.
But it has drawbacks. One is, that CGIHTTPServer can't do a redirect. (HTTP
code 302).

I whish that there was a simple and small (not twisted) webserver written in Python which can
be used in production. But I think there is none.

Thomas

BTW, use subprocess and not os.system() if you need to call other executables.

 

[Bernard]

Did you take a look at web.py? That one looks terribly small and
efficient

We use CherryPy coupled with compiled Cheetah Templates for
every web server based projects at my workplace and we've been really
satisfied with it so far.